CRASH TEST DUMMIES

by Mark K. Anderson

Numbers don't speak much -- and when they do, it's usually not to
reporters.

So the lack of media fanfare was not surprising when, in December, the
National Transportation Safety Board released thousands of pages of
data, charts, findings, figures and facts on the investigation of the
July 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. But to several seasoned military
crash experts, these numbers didn't speak; they sang.

"I'm looking at the hard physical evidence," Commander William S.
Donaldson, a retired Navy aviator and air crash investigator, told the
Advocate. "The government is saying one thing, and the evidence is
saying another. ... All the physical evidence fits perfectly with an
explosion outside of the airplane."

Following an exhaustive analysis of the Flight 800 investigation,
Donaldson has concluded that, as he puts it, "either the aircraft was
hit by an Amtrak Metroliner on the left side or by a powerful
anti-aircraft weapon."

The NTSB maintains that a spark caused the 747's center fuel tank to
explode, causing the jetliner to break up in mid-air and fall into the
sea, killing all 230 people on board. But that theory explains nothing
about the actual data from the crash, Donaldson said. In fact, it
confuses the matter.

"The government's position doesn't make any sense. The more you get
into it, the less sense it makes," Donaldson said. "It gets very
frustrating. We need to hold these people's feet to the fire."

Donaldson, whose work has received alarmingly little attention from
the American media, presents a serious challenge to the FBI/NTSB
investigation, which seems to have reached the conclusion, almost by
default, that an unspecified mechanical failure caused the crash.

Despite the sparse coverage of his findings, Donaldson has gained a
sympathetic ear on Capitol Hill. Representative James A. Trafficant
Jr. (D-OH) has consulted with Donaldson and has joined him in calling
for a full congressional investigation into the crash, including the
possibility that the plane was downed by a missile. (Many critics of
the NTSB investigation have argued that an American missile fired
accidentally from a "hot" military warning area near the accident
downed the plane. But Donaldson finds it more likely that the missile
was fired by a foreign terrorist organization.)

Donaldson is attracting allies in high places elsewhere within the
Beltway as well. Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, a former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended a Jan. 8 press conference in
Washington at which Donaldson announced his findings. Moorer said he
found Donaldson's report very persuasive.

"Commander Donaldson is a very experienced aviator and very
experienced in the process of investigating accidents. He's a highly
credible source," Moorer told the Advocate.

Moorer found Donaldson's discussion of eyewitness testimony especially
compelling. "You can't just brush it off by saying there was no
missile, because so many people saw it from beginning to end.

"We should seriously consider a formal congressional investigation,"
Moorer added, echoing his previous calls for independent and critical
scrutiny of the crash in which, as Moorer told the Detroit News, "all
evidence would point to a missile."

The best place to begin such an investigation, Donaldson noted, is
with the people who witnessed the crash.

At his press conference, Donaldson turned the podium over to National
Guard helicopter pilot Major Frederick C. Meyer, who saw the crash
from the air. Since he first spoke to the press on the day after the
crash, Meyer has maintained that he saw a streak of light cross the
sky and intercept the doomed jetliner. Meyer says he then saw an
"ordnance explosion" followed by the breakup and eventual crash of the
airplane.

In addition to speaking with Meyer for his report, Donaldson
interviewed 96 people who saw the crash from the ground. All 96,
scattered along 11 miles of shoreline, reported seeing a streak of
light rise from the surface of the water and merge with the plane
before the plane exploded. The FBI and NTSB have countered that the
witnesses saw either burning jet fuel falling from the airplane or
they saw the 747, decapitated by a fuel tank explosion, climbing
several thousand feet before exploding a final time and falling into
the ocean.

Additionally, using Global Positioning System satellite technology,
Donaldson triangulated the locations of the eyewitnesses and the
trajectories of the streaks they reported. The data, he said, suggests
that they all saw the same "streak of light" emerge from the water.

"These people are stretched out along 11 mines of coastline, and
they're all pointing to the same place," Donaldson said. "Now, you get
11 miles of coast and dozens of people who have never met before all
pointing to the same place. What's the chance of that being
coincidence?"

To Donaldson's surprise, federal investigators have not done such an
analysis. "The NTSB literally did not consider the eyewitness
testimony," he said. "They were operating under the premise that the
FBI was already considering that." And the FBI, he added, has never
addressed the eyewitness data as anything more than a series of
anomalies. The bureau did not, so far as Donaldson has ever seen, even
do his simple triangulation experiment. Instead, as he put it, "The
FBI has thrown a cloak over that kind of eyewitness."

Like the eyewitness testimony, the physical data also points
unmistakably toward a missile, Donaldson said.

"There are many physical anomalies in the evidence," he noted. "And
they're consistent with the picture that the aircraft had been engaged
by another force."

For instance, the nose landing gear doors were blown into the wheel
well -- requiring an external force that a "mechanical failure"
explosion of the center fuel tank or a fall into the ocean could not
provide. "Some huge hammer blow hit those doors from the outside," he
said.

Furthermore, he observed, the pattern of damage on the external metal
"skin" on the aircraft's fuselage points to a high-pressure wave
striking the plane from below and to the left.

"Some force underneath and forward left also pushed the whole nose up
and made the skin on the bottom pull tight and apart and the skin on
the top wrinkle together," Donaldson said. "There was an external push
that caused the skin to fail." The NTSB's mechanical failure model, he
added, could not have brought about such structural damage.

In another finding that suggests a high-pressure explosion below and
to the left of the aircraft, Donaldson explained why the skin above
the left wing was shredded. "When you have a huge, slamming shock wave
striking from below, it hits the bottom of the wing, and the energy
gets transferred through the liquid [fuel]." As a result, he said, the
fuel stored in the left wing struck the wing's upper skin with enough
force to tear the metal to pieces. The right wing did not suffer
similar damage, he added, because it was shielded from the blast by
the plane's fuselage.

Donaldson's most damning evidence, though, comes from the recently
released records of the Flight Data Recorder. After the NTSB's
December public hearings into the Flight 800 investigation, the data
captured by the doomed airliner's "black box" was released for public
scrutiny. But the final second and a half of data was crossed out.

"The whole reason that you put that piece of gear -- the expensive
piece of gear -- in this airplane is to be able to recover it and play
it back and see exactly what everything in that airplane was doing,"
Donaldson said in a Dec. 23 radio interview. "When they get to the
very end of the tape -- the stuff that's the whole reason the gear is
in the airplane -- they literally drew a line through the last data
block and made a note on the side: 'End of Flight 800 data.' When you
look at it, it's hard to read through it at first -- you assume, as I
did, that this was some kind of previous recording or something and I
sort of skipped over it."

The NTSB maintains that the data is meaningless because it was
actually a transcript from a previous flight. Donaldson counters that
the extreme conditions recorded on the "last data line" could not
sustain flight and therefore must be from Flight 800's final moments.

However chaotic and jumbled the "last data line" appears to the
untrained eye, Donaldson argues that the Flight Data Recorder shows
conclusively that a high-pressure wave coming from 60 feet below and
to the left of the fuselage struck the plane. (A detailed analysis of
Donaldson's findings has been posted at
members.aol.com/bardonia/cdrindex.htm.)

The data recorder's terminal second shows the airspeed falling nearly
200 knots, the altitude "dropping" 3,600 feet (a false reading,
Donaldson asserts, given by a high-pressure wave striking the
altitude-sensing instruments) and the front end of the plane pitching
up -- exerting such forces on the crew and passengers that they all
would have died instantaneously of whiplash.

Donaldson's reading of the flight data records is further corroborated
by the autopsy data. As he wrote in an acerbic letter to FBI Director
Louis Freeh on Dec. 3, "The medical examiners' universal cause of
death of FL800's crew and passengers was cranium/cervical spine
separation due to ligament failure. In layman's terms: fatal whiplash.

"These injuries are not at all consistent with your contract cartoon,"
he continued, referring to the CIA-produced videotape, which the FBI
and NTSB released in November to advance the mechanical failure
theory. "Any yaw, pitch or angular deceleration force strong enough to
break everyone's neck would have immediately flamed out all four
engines."

The CIA's "contract cartoon" is the ultimate in irresponsibility,
Donaldson said: It shows just how far some in the government's
investigation will go to mislead the public.

"It was entertaining but like most cartoons grossly abused universal
laws of nature," he wrote to Freeh. "In my view, the 'Alice in
Wonderland' public positions the FBI has taken in this incident have
now crossed over from being merely illogical or incompetent to the
appearance of obstruction of justice," he added, saying that he had
"seen better police work in Pink Panther movies."

Donaldson said he finds too much suspicious behavior in the
government's investigation to simply write its failure off to
bureaucratic ineptitude.

"I can't believe anybody can be this incompetent," he said. "I suspect
it's a cover-up, yes."

He hopes that his findings will prompt Congress to hold its own
hearings into the investigation.

"Somebody's going to break through," he noted. "But till then, people
like me are going to be plugging away."